Texas Never Whispers: Two Days on Tour With Parquet Courts

Mike Powell follows self-proclaimed "anti-reverb" quartet Parquet Courts in their native Texas across 48 sticky-hot hours and finds a band working through their own principles of rebelliousness and romance in real time.

It is 88 and humid in Houston, Texas, and Andrew Savage is jumping rope. “Keeps the blood going,” he says. Portable, too. Even at home in Brooklyn, it’s his preferred mode of exercise: compact and rigorous and exhausting, despite going nowhere at all. In the afternoon heat he starts to look like a shaken soda bottle, fizzing at his sweatline.

Savage is one of the singers and guitar players in Parquet Courts, a band I later describe to my cab driver as “punky and a little weird.” On this night in early June, they play the bottom level of an old dancehall called Fitzgerald’s in a neighborhood called the Heights. It has a low ceiling and no air conditioning and thick wooden pylons where patrons used to pitch horses. A busted-looking guy in a hazard vest wanders in during soundcheck and announces that he used to come here to see a band called Lick, but that was 30 years ago. His name is Brady, and he is summarily asked to leave. “I’ve been kicked out of worse places,” he says, and slinks back into the heat.

Parquet Courts have just come from a wedding in Beaumont, a small town near the Louisiana border, where their other singer and guitarist, Austin Brown, grew up. Brown was the best man; Savage was the wedding’s officiant. The couple hadn’t heard Savage’s ceremony speech until he performed it. Topics included not just the nature and gravity of commitment but a continued understanding of what that commitment means. “Not letting vows become abstract,” as Savage puts it.

“I believed in them as a couple,” he continues. Had he not, would he have turned the invitation down? “Absolutely,” he says. In general, Savage is principled and decisive, and seems proud of his decisiveness—the feedback loop of the serious artist. In two days, I see him smile once. He is 28 years old and his energy comes on like a broiler, immediate and intense.

Copies of the band’s third album, Sunbathing Animal, sit in a stack on a folding table nearby. It is scrappy, urgent music made by people who appear to be at the edge of something, whether sanity, or revelation, or both. Much of it sounds like garage rock that has been chopped up and rationed out by the millisecond, for maximum impact. Savage, who grew up a “belligerent punker,” talks about the terrain of the self with the scrutiny and idealism that hardcore bands use to talk about the government. “Do I bother to define myself, beyond what they allow?” goes one lyric. “Have I already forgotten how?” Both his and Brown’s voices have the flat, penetrating sound of test tones from the emergency weather service.

Their last album, Light Up Gold, came out in late 2012 on Savage and friend Chris Pickering’s Dull Tools imprint and swiftly sold out, prompting a reissue by the New York label What’s Your Rupture? Of the 12 months contained in the year 2013, they toured for 10 of them, straddling the strange schedule of small club shows and big-ticket festivals afforded to modern day mid-level indie bands. They have played late-night network TV and ridden donkeys through the Mexican sunset. Outside BB’s, a bar and restaurant proffering what they call Tex-Orleans cooking, a family friend of Brown’s asks if this is his life now—“this” meaning the band. Brown is a tall, scarecrow-looking guy with a sweet moonface and a dry sense of humor. “Yeah,” he says. “I just travel around the country, seeing my friends for 30 minutes at a time.”

Parquet Courts identify as a “New York band,” with all attendant weight and mythos, but the truth is that their context is broader. Late last year, they made a mixtape of artists they like and consider peers, almost none of whom are from New York but instead from places like Austin, Detroit, and Olympia—secondary cities where cameras are happy to go but aren’t necessarily waiting for something to happen.

Though the band formed in Brooklyn, Andrew Savage and his 22-year-old brother Max, who plays drums, are from Denton, a college town 45 minutes outside Dallas. Andrew and Brown met at the University of North Texas in Denton, and Andrew met bassist Sean Yeaton when Yeaton came through town with a screamo band. (“I’m a badass only by proxy,” Yeaton says.) At some point, Andrew and I discuss the casual prejudices leveled against places like Arkansas, where he has some roots. “Yankee bullshit,” he says, dismissively. Despite their urban cachet, Parquet Courts still have the rough edge of transplants eager to be counted by the big city but who can’t shake their small town.

Whatever New York lineage the band could be part of—the Velvet Underground, Television, etc.—has spent the past 30 years crystallizing into a fiction capitalized on for the sake of nostalgia more often than anything else. (Nevermind that New York in the 1970s was cheap, dangerous, and undesirable.) Listen to Sunbathing Animal at a distance and you hear guitar music; listen to the sound of underground New York now and you hear eclecticism, cross-pollination, and a lot of music with no guitars at all. Culturally and sonically, Parquet Courts’ clocks are stopped at 1995.

If anything, they could be an auxiliary chapter of Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azzerad’s book chronicling artists who bridged punk ideals with sounds we retroactively call indie rock: the Minutemen, Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Sonic Youth. Set Sunbathing Animal alongside the SST catalog from the mid-1980s, and it would fit fine. At shows in both Houston and Dallas, the band is surrounded by people they have known for years, met through self-booked tours and house shows and that unofficial network by which the American underground, in the face of all prevailing pressure, endures.

Business-wise, they maintain a no-ads policy, and, according to Andrew, recently turned down a “pretty popular TV show” he declines to name, noting that “it’s not important.” Questions of this nature—how to define integrity, basically—are subject to complexities so tiny and particular that the big picture becomes less important.

Sunbathing Animal, for example, was co-released on What’s Your Rupture? and something called Mom + Pop Music, which at the end of a not particularly hidden paper trail leads to a small team of industry veterans ultimately connected to Sony. Neither Andrew nor What’s Your Rupture? want to talk about the relationship, presumably because it dilutes some classic notion of independence.

It is an old tightrope to walk. The reality is that no amount of friendly press is going to make Parquet Courts less weird than they are. Andrew talks admiringly of bands like Roxy Music, who managed to get on TV while still making what they wanted to make. “It’s those people at the margins,” he says. When he talks about his admiration for Russian painting and composition during the Stalinist era, his interest seems to stem as much from the art itself as from the idea that it was a rebellion—something radical, but still visible to the public eye. “These were guys with manifestos,” he says. Later, while talking about the ways indie rock in the mid-2000s seemed to drift toward imprecision and spaciness, he offers his own: “We’re an anti-reverb band.”

In Houston, Brown is under the weather but remains unusually excited: Representatives from the local rap label Swishahouse have requested his presence in the green room. “I grew up on that stuff,” he says on the walk back to Fitzgerald’s, referring to a history of turned-down music brought into national markets by artists like DJ Screw and UGK. Of special interest is the rapper Lil’ Keke, whose name Brown repeats like a child trying to grasp the impossible prospect of Santa Claus.

Filled with people, the room at Fitzgerald’s takes on a sweatbox aspect. Ceiling fans are sheer comedy. It is the kind of situation for which cold beer was invented. Out on the patio, revelers smoke and wait in humidity that feels doubly romantic after dark.

In the green room, Max paces a small circle with a shot of liquor in a bottle top. He is a stoic, good-natured guy who could probably fit into a mailing tube. His drumming is the wire on which all Parquet Courts songs hang. In the two days I am with the band, I barely talk to him, not because he is unapproachable, but because I worry I will be disturbing a pleasant dream. Pack leader that he is, Andrew later points out that Max was in the top 10 in his high-school class and was given a “princely package” from several colleges but chose NYU, starting as pre-med but shifting to math with a minor in creative writing. Hearing Andrew talk about his younger brother, I am reminded of how much I love my own.

Lil’ Keke does not make it after all, though G-Dash—Co-CEO of Swishahouse—does, accompanied by a huge, taciturn man who introduces himself only as “B.” G-Dash and Brown discuss the tensions of staying independent while trying to break into larger audiences. “They got you in Best Buy?” G-Dash asks. Brown nods. Everyone poses for a photograph. In the Swishahouse gift box to the band are an assortment of T-shirts and records, and what appears to be a small, shrink-wrapped joint.

They will play bigger stages on this tour, but the quartet’s music seems best suited to hot, small ones like this. Brown—in a fresh Swishahouse tee—occasionally twists around with his guitar, like he is caught in a bedsheet, and Yeaton headbangs continuously, his feet screwed into the floor. Beyond that, the band is almost entirely still. Were the music not so kinetic, the show would be boring. For his part, Andrew spends most of the set with his body a half turn away from the audience but still facing out, blinking rarely, looking like a guy in a horror movie reckoning a line of zombies coming over the hill.

In sound and theme, Sunbathing Animal is an album obsessed with ruts, habits, cycles, and returns—things that keep us contained. Its title—and title track—is a reference both to a painting by the Dutch artist Karel Appel and to Andrew’s house cat, an animal probably happier captive than released. The song itself is a piece of hardcore so repetitive and stretched-out that it starts to sound like mantra. “Running circles in my plot, howling like a tethered mutt that broke free for the first time/ So proud that he got caught,” Andrew shouts. “In his brief emancipation he can feel what I cannot.” With no exceptions it is the most penetrating song about a cat I have ever heard.

It also points to the band’s psychedelic capacity. Dwellers in a vertical city, they are primed to see infinity in whatever cramped spaces they can. When they play "Sunbathing" at Fitzgerald’s—with a break so narrow between it and “Light Up Gold” it almost seems like they are falling headfirst—a stream of people in the crowd make their way to the front and start stage diving. From where I stand, they look like spare parts flying off a conveyor belt.

The drive from Houston to Dallas takes about three and a half hours by way of a blue-black van packed to the ceiling. In Huntsville, we pass a state penitentiary on one side of the highway and the Texas Prison Museum on the other. (The “S” in “Texas” is shackled to a ball and chain.) Green stretches out indefinitely.

Whatever conversation is had comes in fragments, with the occasional comment made speculatively and without expectation of answer, followed by drops into silence. Yeaton reads Dune; Max retreats into his headphones. At some point, everyone—including their tour manager, Chris Newmyer, who is also driving—appears to be texting.

Someone puts on the ‘80s German band Trio, who are famous for being in a Volkswagen ad but apparently much weirder than I would have guessed. “Big influence on Sunbathing Animal,” Andrew says. “You know, their drummer was a clown, trained in Italy.” He often talks in information, eager to both share what he knows and flaunt it at the same time.

Conversation moves to Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (whose opera The Love for Three Oranges is referenced on the Sunbathing Animal song “Duckin’ and Dodgin’”); art in Stalinist Russia (“him and his crew would just get up in the middle of performances and leave—that’s when you knew you’d done something wrong”); the writer William T. Vollmann (“seems like a crazy cat”); and painting, which Andrew studied in college. Favorites include Cy Twombly, Egon Schiele, the CoBrA group, Marlene Dumas, Jean-Michel Basquiat—artists who, like Parquet Courts, can seem radical and stubborn but are at heart less invested in intellect than in emotionality.

From the front seat, Brown announces that he has been texting with G-Dash, and they are negotiating a Swishahouse remix of the Parquet Courts song “He’s Seeing Paths”, from last year’s Tally All the Things That You Broke EP. Andrew, who seems to treat the band’s opportunities as ethical decisions, shoots up from the back. “What? What’s that?”

Tonight they are in Club Dada, a low-lying brick building in the Deep Ellum neighborhood. The Savages spend most of the evening with family and old friends, many of whom they haven’t seen in years. At one point, between the soundcheck and show, Max catches up with a girl he went to high school with and talks like an extraordinarily grateful person who believes that he has won life’s lottery and now spends his days in quiet awe of his luck.

Sundown over the patio as the room fills up. Yeaton and I share a beer and conversation turns personal. He is a true teddy bear, friendly and sensitive and easier to open up to than anyone else in the band. Him and his wife got married two weeks after last year’s tour ended, and found out they were pregnant shortly before this one started. He has not a single ungrateful word to say about being able to do what he does but also acknowledges the ways in which it forces him to renegotiate the distance between himself and the elusive state people call “home.” “I had a kind of disjointed family growing up,” he says. “I just never want those things to be on the backburner for me.”

Lately he has been waking up from a dream in which him and his closest friends are splitting a timeshare on the moon. “It’s a bachelor-party situation,” he says. “You know—mixed nuts and beer.” The picture is convivial but relaxed—a moment when the infinite hustles of life recede into the background and he is allowed to sit still and be. Just as they start to settle in, they look out the window and notice the earth rising. “It happens so fast,” he says quietly. They pack their bags and go, having barely been there at all.

The band plays, the people bop. I watch a poor photographer roll back and forth in the pit like a marble on the deck of some turbulent boat. Andrew dedicates “Instant Disassembly” to his mom and dad, who tells me he’s seen a lot of Parquet Courts shows in his days but thinks this was probably the best one yet. “He says that a lot,” Andrew tells me, but I get the sense he is still happy to hear it.

Back on the patio I meet Jennifer, who has driven three hours from Austin. She won’t say how old she is but will say her first show was 32 years ago—Adam and the Ants—and she’s pretty sure Parquet Courts are her fucking favorite band right now, even though the guitar players are “freaky and introverted.”

“I crawled onstage to get this shit,” she says, showing me the night’s set list. It is a wrinkled piece of paper with some shoe prints on it. Each Parquet Court has given her their autograph, but none have actually written their names. All I can make out is a strange tangle of symbols, some possibly Chinese characters, and a series of letters forming no known words.

In time, everyone filters out and the band is left to negotiate the geometry of the empty van. Andrew takes a deep breath and adjusts his hat. “All right,” he says. “Time to lift heavy boxes.”